ABSTRACT
David Lindsay’s Ane Satire of the Thrie Estaitis (1552-54) is a morality play.1 It describes how its protagonist, Rex Humanitas, sets out to be a good king; how he is tempted, through falsehood, deceit and flattery, to fall into the embrace of sensuality, and how he is redeemed from his fall by correction, by diligence, by good counsel and by taking heed of the common good. The play has English and Anglo-Irish generic counterparts: John Bale’s King Johan (1538) shows its twelfth-century king in desperate need of advice from his country and the commonality in order to withstand papal sedition; the remaining fragment of the earlier Anglo-Irish Pride of Life (1400, lost in the Dublin Four Courts explosion of 1922 and only surviving in a photographed fragment made in 1891) shows its king relying on his stalwarts, strength and health, with an occasional dose of mirth, to fortify him as death approaches. Another anonymous and justly famous play of 1470 shows mankind being led so far astray by the devil’s mischief that he forgets the promise of redemption and only just extricates himself from certain suicide by throwing himself back upon God’s mercy, the promise of which he has wholeheartedly embraced at the beginning of the play.
